How Father Neuhaus Found GOP

High up on the domed ceiling of Vienna’s Karlskirche is an exuberant early 18th-century Baroque fresco called “Defeat of the Lutheran Heresy.” It depicts an annoyed Martin Luther, quill pen in hand, scowling as a po-faced Catholic angel puts his books to the torch while Luther’s co-author—Satan—recoils from the divine presence. The painting serves as a reminder that bitter antipathies between Protestants and Catholics continued after the European wars of religion ended. Protestants, for their part, long persisted in viewing the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon and the pope as Antichrist.

But the cleric, activist, and intellectual Richard John Neuhaus, according to Randy Boyagoda’s excellent new biography, saw the Catholic-Lutheran split as only a misunderstanding. Luther, in his view, was trying to reform the Catholic Church rather than break it apart. Neuhaus saw his own mission, as a Lutheran pastor for 30 years, as “the healing of the breach of the sixteenth century between Rome and the Reformation.” When he decided that reconciliation was impossible, he converted to Catholicism in 1990 and was ordained as a priest a year later; some called it the most prominent conversion since John Henry Newman’s.

While Neuhaus preached harmony and cooperation between Christian denominations, he became increasingly bellicose toward liberalism, modernism, and secularism. Though he had been a leftist in the ’60s, from the 1980s until his death in 2009 he emerged as a leader of the religiously oriented and mostly Catholic neoconservatives sometimes referred to as the “theocons.” Neuhaus was an important figure in Republican politics and the culture wars, infusing intellectual conservatism with distinctively Catholic elements and bringing not peace but a sword.

Most Americans, even most Catholics, have probably never heard of Neuhaus. He didn’t have the visibility of prelates like Cardinal John O’Connor and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the fame of public intellectuals like William F. Buckley Jr. and Garry Wills, or the reputation of theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray. Many of his three dozen books were too dense or prolix to command wide audiences, although his 1984 work The Naked Public Square received considerable attention and has continued to influence the debate over what role religion should play in American public life. He was a beguiling essayist, but most of his long, discursive, and bitingly amusing editorials appeared in First Things, the magazine he founded and edited, which continues to be an estimable publication but has never had a very large circulation. And his influence was mainly exercised behind the scenes and directed toward elites, particularly in the Vatican and the White House.

But Boyagoda persuasively argues that Neuhaus was a charismatic leader and original thinker whose contributions to American culture and politics make him someone worth knowing about. Neuhaus grew up in a small town in rural Canada, the sixth of eight children. He dropped out of his Nebraska high school and, after an interlude running a gas station in West Texas, graduated from seminary and followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a Lutheran pastor, serving first in upstate New York and then in a poor and mostly minority parish in Brooklyn. Exposure to the hardships of urban life made him an early and energetic participant in the civil rights movement, which segued into antiwar activism. Neuhaus helped to found Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV) and for a while was a budding figure in the late ’60s political left, spouting glib pronouncements about the coming revolution. The Vietnamese people, he declared at the height of his radicalism, were “God’s instrument for bringing the American empire to its knees.”

By the early 1970s, however, a variety of factors conspired to distance Neuhaus from the left. One was his revulsion against the ecology movement’s push to save an allegedly overpopulated planet through sterilization and abortion. Neuhaus believed that population control was still colored by its origins in eugenics and scientific racism. He perceived that its targets were the weak and oppressed, both in the Third World and in his own Brooklyn congregation, as black and poor women accounted for a disproportionate share of abortions. Neuhaus’s view of abortion as a civil rights issue was an important continuity in his transition from left to right.

So too was his opposition to an overly rigid separation between church and state. A key Neuhaus dictum was that “politics is at the heart of culture” and “at the heart of culture is religion.” Therefore it was important that American politics, society, and culture should be open to religious perspectives and persons rather than devolving into militant secularism—what Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” Religion too should be public and patriotic; as he later put it, “God is not indifferent to the American experiment.” Even when Neuhaus presided over an antiwar church service at which resisters turned in their draft cards, he persuaded the assembled radicals to join him in a lusty rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

After the fall of Saigon, Neuhaus was distressed to find that few of his leftist allies were willing to condemn Vietnam’s Communist government for its human rights abuses; they had abandoned their ethical standards and aspirations, he charged, for the cause of personal liberation and the search for “the perfect orgasm.” He also felt that the mainline Protestant denominations had capitulated to a coarse and increasingly secularized culture.

Though Neuhaus had supported Jimmy Carter for president in 1976, he became an ardent Reaganite four years later. Soon he was making common cause with conservatives and neoconservatives on issues including anticommunism, military spending, abortion, defense of capitalism and traditional family structure, and opposition to the liberal pronouncements of the American Catholic bishops. One of his most significant initiatives came in 1994, when he teamed with former Watergate trickster Charles Colson to produce the Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) declaration. ECT was an ecumenical attempt to find common ground between the two groups of religious conservatives, focusing on their shared opposition to abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, and population control as well as their advocacy of school choice, a market economy, religious freedom, and “a renewed appreciation of Western culture.”

Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition pointed to Neuhaus’s work as one of the factors uniting Catholic swing voters with the Republican Party’s evangelical base in the critical 1994 elections. Indeed, the increasing political alignment of conservatives of all faiths is one of the major shifts in modern American politics. The tendency of evangelicals not only to vote like conservative Catholics but even to discuss social issues in a Catholic framework of natural law and moral reasoning would have seemed very odd not so long ago. Evangelicals had been slow to condemn abortion in the 1970s, for example, because they saw it as a Catholic issue, and reflexive opposition to Catholicism was a large part of how they defined themselves. Since many evangelicals in past decades would have denied that Mormons as well as Catholics are Christians, Mitt Romney could be considered a beneficiary of Neuhaus’s ecumenical efforts.

Neuhaus’s increasing prominence helped to make him a friend of Pope John Paul II, a collaborator with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), and an informal advisor to President George W. Bush, who looked to “Father Richard” for guidance on incorporating Catholic vocabulary and concepts into “compassionate conservatism.” Neuhaus and his colleagues at First Things in turn became largely uncritical champions of Bush, editorializing in favor of his domestic policies and characterizing his Iraq invasion as a “just war”—although Neuhaus did insist that torture, which the U.S. resorted to in its war on terror, was “never morally permissible.”

Unsurprisingly, Neuhaus in his last years became a target for those who saw him at the center of a theocon conspiracy to break down the separation of church and state and put an end to secular politics in America.

It was Neuhaus’s posthumous good fortune to have attracted Randy Boyagoda as his biographer. Boyagoda, a Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist and English professor, was an occasional contributor to First Things during Neuhaus’s editorship but met him only once. His account is sympathetic but objective, and he brings both scholarly acuity and a novelist’s gift for evocative scene-setting to every page. The book pivots adroitly from deep theological analysis to anecdotes about Neuhaus’s fondness for bourbon, cigars, dogs, Bach, and good talk. By the end, most readers are likely to share the author’s evident affection for his subject.

Boyagoda ably refutes charges that Neuhaus’s shift from left to right was motivated by opportunism or that he and his circle were extremists seeking to impose a quasi-medieval theocracy on America. Still, Neuhaus could be a more polarizing figure than he usually appears in this account. There isn’t much in the book about Neuhaus’s insistence that America is a Christian nation leading the forces of Christendom, his characterization of homosexuality as a pathology, his call for “intelligent design” to be taught in public schools, or his push to exclude Catholic Democrats from the sacrament of communion. Whatever the merits of these positions, they unquestionably were divisive and, as Neuhaus sometimes reminded himself, risked turning religion into partisan politics. “We can confuse our Christian hope with political success,” he warned the Christian Coalition, and “there is a danger that we confuse our political policy judgments with the judgments of God.”

Religious neoconservatism, tied as it was to Bush and Benedict, could not avoid being tarnished by Iraqi misadventures and Catholic sex-abuse scandals. By now, most social conservatives would concede that they have lost the public-opinion battle on same-sex marriage and perhaps assisted suicide as well, which has led many to question Neuhaus’s belief that liberal democracy and Catholicism are compatible. The result is that the Neuhaus/First Things position is losing ground both to liberalism and to the “radical Catholicism” that, as described by University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, “is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government.” The value of this biography of Richard John Neuhaus, then, is not just as a work of history and remembrance but as a guide to coming conflict.

“Though he had been a leftist in the ’60s, from the 1980s until his death in 2009 he emerged as a leader of the religiously oriented and mostly Catholic neoconservatives sometimes referred to as the “theocons.” ”

If I only had a dollar for every leftist who became a hard-rightist, and made sweet, sweet money from it……

This was a great review of an important book. Kabaservice is indeed correct that there is going to be a big debate over what role traditionalist Christians will play in post Christian America.

What many have not realized is that the anger they now face from leftist secular people was engendered by the bigotry the religious right meted out against gays and atheists when they had power. The sins of the fathers are returning.

“If I only had a dollar for every leftist who became a hard-rightist, and made sweet, sweet money from it……”

I wasn’t going to comment on this article until the weekend, but your comment struck me as an unsupportable first comment for this article.

For people of faith what it is often easy to mistake Christ for some manner of social crusader. He is not that, not even close. He even states forthrightly, “Get behind me Satan, for thou has in mind the thoughts of men . . . but I am about the thoughts (mind) of God”

But if one interprets Christ’s behavior as that of men, it is easy, even for people of Christ to manifest their practice into issues in line with the values of Christ as outlined in the Sermon on the Mount as social imperatives. But when joined with liberals solely of men’s existential beginings and ends, they eventually run into Paul’s light cannot be joined with dark refernce and in politics eventually people of God run into that reality. That liberals are all about advancing man’s desires and many of those are forbidden by Christ, they cannot in good conscience continue. When that moment arrives, it is not uncommon for them to run away home and home can manifest itself in some fairly right leaning thoughts and behavior. But their goal is to manifest Christ 9make amends – seek forgiveness, which means keeping the Mount Sermon and dumping the dirty water. That for many is a painful and often humbling if not humiliating revelation. Pehaps, it will lead to wealth, but in the case of Father Neuhause, I am not sure heir is evidence that his goal was mammon.

Furthermore, while Catholic clergy often take a vow of poverty, there is no Biblical mandate to do so — none. So even if it were accurate that Father Neuhaus profitted from his turn, that is not a sin or even inapproprate.

And make no mistake, while we are not a biblically founded nation, all of the founders, and intellectuals up until nearly the turn turn of the century were well acquainted with a vast biblical ethic that served as guide in establising and ethic by which we operated, even atheists did so. Tere are few if any discussions on policy that did not ackowledge openly or in more subtle rhetoric this — “our christian duty.”

I find myself at odds even with some his right leaning contentions – but at least he has returned home.

Even now liberals attempt to pin christians to their strange 9wholly unchristian) policies with what Christ would have done. When clearly, Christ would have said,

“Get behind me for you have your goal the things of men and not of God.”

“When that moment arrives, it is not uncommon for them to run away home and home can manifest itself in some fairly right leaning thoughts and behavior. But their goal is to manifest Christ 9make amends – seek forgiveness, which means keeping the Mount Sermon and dumping the dirty water.”

Great, but why does that square easily with going out into the streets of Baghdad to advance democracy over the barrel of an FNMAG?

I’ve always wondered about why almost all of those who switch from left to right or vice versa become true believers. Neuhaus switched because of abortion & anti-communism. But he eventually also became an opponent of most of the great society social welfare programs he had previously supported and a supporter of unfettered capitalism. Is there any reason for this other than being a good supporter of the “new team”?

A few a you actually knew Neuhaus–an advantage I not share. I never met the man; but I read nearly everything he wrote since the middle 1980’s.

It seems to me that many have chosen to relegate him to political hell solely due to his support of the Iraqi War. Given his untimely death, it is unfortunate we do not have the benefit of his reflections upon that support now. It is unseemly to castigate him now after benefiting from that period of reflection we have had that he did not.

A careful reading of Neuhaus’s writings would show that he shared the same uneasiness most conservatives have with the Republican party. The unfortunate fact of modern American politics is that it is only the Republican party which will even give conservative causes (particularly the pro-life cause)a hearing. That Neuhaus found himself in Republican circles is hardly anymore surprising than it should be for most of us–even for those writing for this magazine.

Or maybe, Neuhaus’ real sin was that he didn’t become a libertarian. Maybe if Neuhaus’ pro-life activism had prevailed, some here would hold that if they couldn’t procure abortions for their girlfriends that meant we lived in an intolerable theocracy. Maybe, if he were “personally opposed but…” on gay marriage, he’d be more than welcome in our memories.

This comment was originally intended for a different article, but it may be suited for this one. If not excuse my mistake.

I don’t think there is much evidence that Father Neuhaus enjoyed a good deal of personal gain, and that was his goal that negatively influenced his bond to right thinking. Mistaking the benefits of leadersip while ignoring the responsibilities and burdens may lead one to be misinflormed about nature of leadership via the lens of media “celebrity”.

There is no evidence that the the small percentages of abuse were ever widespread. And the damage was mre the result of band wagon mentality for salacious material as with most public sexual media renderings the truth is hard to see. And as with most if not all such issues, institutions are hard pressed to effectively deal those questions in the public arena, when every choise is treated as though sinister secret cabals to cover-up as opposed to be prudentwith people’s lives. There was a scandal, but it was never even being as pervasive as many have made it appear.

There were vast errors made that made the matter worse, but t was never as grand iscope or breadth as we were led t believe. And it remains true that the most damning was the response by christians and non-christians whose motives were about getting Catholics, christians or both. And for anyone who reads scripture, the current condition of Christianity remains vibrant. What some call losing ground is just the world. No christian ought to be about folding up their tents in a democratic culture we have here because antichristian beliefs practices have become mor blatant. It is as Christ said it would — narrow path —

As for the separation, that is the result of the natural divide between a life in Christ and one without that treats the ethic as antithetical to human living. The Benedict option is not really a choice. A Christian lives in the world – period. We are expected to operate in the world. And that is in my view, the “eye of the needle” to be tempted by so many pleasures that oppose Christ in a world that is constantly reminding that those pleasures are — ok, normal and in fact healthy is very tough. In this respect, life is hard.

Because the world does not understand, it cannot. The war is real, “it is not gainst flesh and blood.” And it was not brought on by Christians. Of course any Cathloic who actuallylens on scripture is going to realise that the agenda of one’s liberal freinds is not the same agend as their own.

The liberal solution on its own is dead end unless it includes issues of right living and explains why whether in Appalachia or Compton, merely handing out a welfare check stagnates the condition of those it is intended to help. Eventually, that realization will cause one to question its veracity.

As for the unneccessary wars — certainly an err. Certainly an err, to continue (doubling down) on the same. But, the response of the christian citizen is not accountable to Christianity but ones common humaness with everyone who else felt the sting of 9/11 and it’s coupling with Muslim faith and practice.

As for apologizing, each to their own conscience. One has to believe that their choixe was in err first. And for anyone on the left to be pointing fingers in light of what democrats have done in Libya, Syria, Egypt, the Ukraine is why christians should not abandon their God and state recognized right to engage in the political discussion. In the referenced First Things article (book review) though he himself opposed the Vietnam conflict, he was surprised at the hypocrisy by his “make kove not war” counterparts when they were silent in face of the brutal massacrees by the “peace loving N. Vietnamese.”

One of the conditions of being a conservative is the constant downward pressure against hypcrisy. In my view, for conservatives such hypocisy is much harder to dismiss than if one is a liberal. Though liberals will brand conservtives with it all the time but one only examine the behavior of the current executive and that of Sec Clinton and the liberal, democratic response to both — get the point about hypocrisy.

The power of capitalism to provide for the “good” of individuals apart from state dependence and the nonchristian ethic that is becoming a increasing expectation of state relations is part and parcel to the stagnation of both community and idividiual being.

Did Neuhaus really move to the right? That surely depends on your definition of right-wing. Most Neocons support gay marriage, feminism, the LGBT agenda, and liberal policies on pornography etc. All of this puts them well to the left, socially, of many of the 1968 student radicals. And as they themselves are the first to admit, Neocons have no objection in principle to big government, mass immigration and so on. There may have been a certain logic in Christian conservatives embracing the likes of Reagan during the Cold War – which was after all billed as a struggle against a militant atheist tyranny – but no such justification can be advanced for Neuhaus and others serving as Christian mouthpieces for the avowedly revolutionary agenda of Norman Podhoretz, David Frum and Michael “Creative Destruction is Our Middle Name” Ledeen. The function of Neuhaus & co was to lure unwitting Catholic conservatives into a crusade against their own interests.

“…a target for those who saw him at the center of a theocon conspiracy to break down the separation of church and state and put an end to secular politics in America.”

That was never going to happen. But it was a useful bogeyman in pursuit of creating an entirely secular politics, that isn’t even restrained in its appetites for war any longer, without even such moral compromises as Just War Theory holding it back from pre-emptive wars for profit.

Michael Dooley: “It is unseemly to castigate him now, after benefitting from that period of reflection that we have that he did not”.

I disagree. Fr Neuhaus undoubtedly wrote many fine things, but the revolutionary intent of the Neoconservative agenda was plain for all to see even in 2003 – as was their fairly deep-seated secularism. So it’s not really a matter of hindsight being 20-20 vision. Indeed what is remarkable about the Neocons is how very few of them have reneged one jot on their revolutionary agenda. If anything they’re more gung-ho than ever for military interventions around the globe – as long as others do the fighting of course.

I am consvative. I generally think most people are conservative when it comes to basic living and what it means to be a citizen. But what that means has been hijacked in so many ways, that what it means is hard to decipher.

What is referenced as neoconservatism does reflet a general understanding of what conservatives believe. I was recently engaged in a long conversation about Pres. Lincoln and he represents the traditional conservative thought, in its extreme. Seeing a wrong, but hard pressd to find a solutuon that woud not damage the whole and the subsequnt consequences.

I think te observations being made about neoconservatives describe a far more careless view of events, environments and consequence than is reflected in the conservative mind. It also suggests a deep lack of confidnce in the principles of the Constitution of the US.

What I find distrustful among neoconservatives is that they seem joined at the hip on issues of immigration and intervention. And they advocate those positions all the while seemingly oblivious to the very real undermining of the citizens thy represnt.

It is as if te country belons soley to them. As though the rest of us are mere renters. I hav no fondness for the pubic as crowd. But when I listn to what is being advanced by conservatives, even the newest eleceted, it is as though what was gain is not at all what was advertised.

Father Neuhaus discovered what was promisd by liberals was not at all what they delivered. He was consistnt on several basic issus. He never thought poverty was a nonissue, just how to address it. He remained consistnt that abortion, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality were out of bounds for Christians and unhealthy for the community at large.

His response to 9/11 was not unlike liberals or conservatives. And in ight of the last eight years minus one, what distances a neoconservative fom an interventionist, immigration easing liberal is a hairline.

” that isn’t even restrained in its appetites for war any longer, without even such moral compromises as Just War Theory holding . . .”

Here’s the problem I have with most of the criticism, they are based on a lot of assumptions about motive.

Assuming that at east some of you are people of faith and understand the value of conscience which at times may act in accordance with belief, there is no room that many people who see threats to the S of them personally actually see them. And that positions as contrary as they may be to the evidence are genuine as opposed to some malicious intent.

Evidence of how immigration policy is damaging to the US is very clear. Yet there are people of conscience many of them believers who sincerely believe the answer is open the flood gates and just let everyone in who has complaint.

Just because some are advocates for war (pre-emptive war) does not make them money grubbing warped “manifest destiny” neo-capitalist swines at the trough. Some room must be left that some sincerely believe that the and its power should be used for good. Neither of the above may have evidentiary support or even be supported by scripture. However, that does not make them insincere.

Colm J:
“… but the revolutionary intent of the Neoconservative agenda was plain for all to see even in 2003 – as was their fairly deep-seated secularism.”
RJN and an agenda for secularism? Are you sober?
It has been a while since I’ve consulted the ghost whisperer, but the guilt by association of RJN with Norman Podhoretz, David Frum and Michael Ledeen is a bit unfair. RJN had many friends and colleagues of various strips. More significantly, RJN did have the utilize the capacity to change his mind. I still maintain he would have astutely reassessed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of all the social movements, RJN thought his participation in the Martin Luther King era of the civil rights movement and the post Roe v. Wade pro-life movement were the most important in his life–particularly his pro-life mission in the latter half of his life. I realize that part of the purpose of this magazine is to blow raspberries and moon the neo-cons; but articles concerning abortion it the American Conservative are…well, let’s just say they make irregular appearances.
What truly is puzzling–at least to a Lutheran–is RJN’s conversion to Catholicism. What separates Lutherans and Catholics are matters of doctrine. Yet in his Apologia, RJN makes no mention of these difficulties. Instead, he justified his submission to Rome by his search for a Church “rightly ordered”. This seems to make sense to Catholics; but it begs the question to Lutherans.
Luther taught that the Christian Church is present wherever the sacraments are kept and the Word rightly preached. Thus, if a Church is mistaken in doctrine the Word cannot be correctly preached. Such a Church cannot be “rightly ordered.
We are left in the dark how RJN resolved this quandary. He believed the Augsburg Confession had been absorbed and accepted by the Church of Rome. As good fortune as this would be to both Churches, it is next to impossible to see how this can be so. Even in the Joint Declaration on Justification, Catholic authorities rejected and severely criticized the Lutheran teachings on justification by grace alone. How RJN reconciled the Lutheran and Catholic theologies remains a mystery.
Be that as it may be, RJN was a towering intellect. He was far from perfect; but, even when he was mistaken, he could take our arguments and wipe the floor with most of us. He was a complex thinker and most of the pat disparagements of RJN grievously under-estimate him.

Michael Dooley: Am I sober? Well I haven’t had a drink so far today, and to the best of my recollection I wasn’t drunk when I wrote my reply to your comment. I didn’t say RJN had an agenda for secularism – I said the Neoconservatives are both revolutionary and secular. For those reasons alone I think Christians should be very careful to make common cause with them – particularly when it comes to issues as fundamental as whether or not to go to war. In my earlier comment I alluded to Michael Ledeen’s famous “Creative destruction is our middle name” essay – a piece which reminds me of nothing so much as the Italian Futurist manifestoes. To judge by many of their public statements, many leading Neocons share the Futurists’ enthusiasm for constant war – a position that surely can never be reconciled with Christianity. One hopes and presumes that RJN didn’t share this enthusiasm, but in my view he should have been more careful about the ideological company he kept.

“To judge by many of their public statements, many leading Neocons share the Futurists’ enthusiasm for constant war – a position that surely can never be reconciled with Christianity.”

idf that is what the neoconservative agenda is, I might agree. But as that is not at all their agenda anyone the least bit familar with it, would have to say, “bunk.”

First the agenda and how it is to be achieved is fluid. It is not predicated soly on warfare and certainly not intended, originally to be a tool used on a whim as many here suggest.

Cases for force

1. instability

2. genocide

3. rogue actors

4. internatinal acts of terrorism

It is much more indepth and complex, but it is not about perpetual warfare. It is a grand strategy, that may be unworkable in the real world for may reasons, but it hardly intended to be an effort of perpetual warfare.

It is the belief in general that the US won the cold war and having don so has some manner or responsibility to foster stable democracies. The general rule, that democracies are the stablset from of governance and fosters the overall life via “free market” styled economies.

And that it is the best interests of the US to do. This effort is not comprised of solely secualrist theorists or advacates.

Furthermore, that the liberal/democratic administration and future candidates supported and to this day advocate the same or similar piicies, it hard to lay the matter at the feet of conservatives. It is more in line with Pres. Wilson and Roosevelts, in my view.

EliteComminc: None of what you say remotely resembles the concrete reality of Neoconservatism. The Neocons supported violent coups against democratically elected governments around the world – including, most recently, in Egypt and Ukraine. They also support various tyrannical regimes – e.g., Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – when it suits their interests. Nor do they believe in free markets. For example most of them enthusiastically supported the bailing out of mega-banks at taxpayers’ expense, not to mention artificially increasing the money supply (aka quantitative easing). Both of these measures completely negate the idea of a free market. As I think my previous comments made clear I regard Neocons as the very antithesis of conservatism, so the notion that one is laying “the matter at the foot of conservatives” simply doesn’t apply. And incidentally I could multiply the quotations from Neocons that show just how enthusiastic they are for constant war, e.g. Jonah Goldberg’s famous line that “every ten years the United States needs to take some crappy little country and bang it against the wall just to show we mean business”. None of this sounds very grown up, much less conservative, to me. As for “stable democracies”: Ledeen’s piece dismissed stability as an “unworthy American goal, and a misleading concept to boot.”

“The Neocons supported violent coups against democratically elected governments around the world – including, most recently, in Egypt and Ukraine . . .”

before I go rooting around in my boxes and spend time trolling the internet. Let’s examine your analysis with respect to your model.

I am going to be direct. Your use of the means to represent the the ends is rather cicular, leaing with you both the conclusion and the process to get their unsupported.

If you have evidence to support that the purpose of the movement was or is perpetual war as both means and goal. I would be very intersted in reading it.

The purpose of the the use of the military was to address just the types of scenarios as I mentioned. Now clearly, some scenarios even most mentioned even by myself would require military force. No doubt and so what? Your commentary reads as if military force to acheive political objectives is unique to the US, unique to the promoters of the Century for the New American Way.

That includes your descriptions of of the scenarios referenced specifically. What I find most interesting is that the examples you bring to the fore are actions by critques of the policy. In other words, blaming neoconservatives for the actions of democrats not onboard with neoconservative notions about projecting american values and ethics is to the least curious.

One could just as easily conclude that you are confused by the examples because they were all under the administrative leadership of those opposed, yet have enacted policies you claim are neoconservatives. Based on your model, one should conclude that whatever the veracity of neoconservative policy and it is a grand narrative — the democratic leadersip is on borad full bore, despite having the ability to change the book, much less turn the page.

Based on that blaming conservatives of any ilk, is very peculiar, but a typical choice by democrats and liberals — blame the other guy.

__________

I am unclear wher you grew up, but this,

“Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – when it suits their interests. Nor do they believe in free markets.”

is hardly a neoconservative created environemnt, or unique as these nation states and the method by which they govern have been in existence prior to the creation CNAW. And in practice through a myriad of US administrations all whch acted as partners. I have some news for you, the US will generally align itself with those who best suit our ends and history demonstrates that our allies are not always nice gys — and that is not a unqique relationship to conservative admnstratins or players.

Pres. Roosevelt was quite willing to placate the Soviet Union. I need not remind you of the admnistrative fairness, enforcement and intent.

Furthermore, whether or not these governments are brutal is a very subjective standard. But your error is locking neoconservatives into some box to suit your purposes. As yu have done with the use of force, You understand what the intent of the grand narrative is. While supporting democracy is first on its, agenda, force is not the only means, especially with respect to countries friendly to the US.

What you are pretending at is some fairy tale vision, as opposed to some manner of concrete realism.

“I could multiply the quotations from Neocons that show just how enthusiastic they are for constant war, e.g. Jonah Goldberg’s famous line that “every ten years the United States needs to take some crappy little country and bang it against the wall just to show we mean business”. None of this sounds very grown up, much less conservative, to me. As for “stable democracies.”

I have no issues with the quotations. But I do have issues when said quotations are cobbled merely to paint the picture you so desire. I was curious so i took a look at one of your referenced authors, in less than two minutes, it became obvious what you had done. Your comprehension of context leaves a good deal to be admired.

It is not perpetual war — it’s total war. A military strategy which in short means — total victory over one’s adversaries. It is a strategy as old as war itself and completely nonunique to modern warfare.

Further it seems rather obvious that what is mean about democracy being unacheivable as a goal is most related to our current posture strategy which does not employ a total war implementation.

Also apart of some strategic thinking is the concept that if oters we cannot manage are at war with each other, they are not at threat to others — I am unclear who advocates that but it is not an unheard contention.